Online Value Proposition

Online Value Proposition

Your Website’s Online Value Proposition

There are several kinds of online value proposition that you will need to consider when you are using your website for sales lead generation or direct selling (eCommerce). And yet, this is an area where many websites come up short.

Value Proposition

Before looking at each proposition type, it is worth reminding ourselves of the differences between an online value proposition and an offline value proposition or standard sales proposition. When offline, your sales value proposition is typically delivered by you personally. That confers major advantages to you. Because you are there, you can mould the value proposition in real-time to precisely align to what you know the listener wants to hear.

Consciously or subconsciously, you may even use the kind of words that you know will appeal to the receiver, or slightly over-pay or under-play certain parts of your proposition to emphasise that part which you know hits a particular spot. We take this for granted and often, we become very good at it!

Online Value Proposition

In the digital world, there is no real-time feedback indicators such as voice, tone or body language. Not only that, but our online value proposition must “speak” to people with many different characteristic attributes (personas) – at different organisation levels perhaps, or at different stages of the buyer cycle. So you cannot adapt it in real-time, or slightly change it based on who we are addressing.

The bottom line is that your online value proposition must be standalone. It must not only convince the receiver of the value it offers, but provoke immediate action of some kind without any interactive elaboration of your buyers needs.

So this means a few things:

You need to pre-empt your buyers needs at different stages of their decision cycle.

You need to offer micro-level value propositions at each stage of their buying cycle.

You need to nurture and track your buyer as they move from one value proposition to the next, and

To induce the required action at each stage, your online value propositions need to be compelling.

“Light” or non-compelling propositions don’t work. They get lost in the noise of infinite information that is the internet. So each proposition needs to offer real and material benefit to the receiver at each given moment in time.

You can view online value propositions as taking one of seven basic forms; within each, there may be many more! They are:

Marketing Value Propositions:

A compelling reason to click a link or call a number in an email or an advertisement.

Page level Value Proposition:

A compelling reason to be engaged on a website page and to take a related action

Exchange Proposition / Opt-in based Value Proposition:

A compelling reason for your prospect to declare their contact details.

Nurturing Propositions:

A compelling reason to take an action that moves your prospect to the next step in your online sales process.

Conversion Propositions:

A compelling reason for your prospect to become a customer. This could be a product / service proposition or a Corporate proposition.

Product / Service Proposition:

A compelling reason to buy your particular product or service instead of a competitor’s.

Corporate Value Proposition:

A compelling reason to buy from you rather than a competitor.

You may be getting the impression that there is a lot of work to do here, not just in defining value propositions at each stage in your selling process, but in articulating them digitally. This is challenging stuff, but is a process that has a big payback because of the major role that these propositions have in your wider digital strategy.

Knowing when to use a particular online value proposition, deciding its purpose within your digital sales process. presenting it in compelling terms and designing actions that transition prospects to the next step is one of the keys to unlocking an effective online sales process.